AppReviewToday- AppReviews

Even though I don't love the term I'm about to use all that much, Strange Horticulture is most easily described as a “cozy game,” albeit with some eldritch horror vibes. You play as the proprietor of a rare plant store, and much of your inventory has special properties that your clientele seeks out to achieve their own ends. But Strange Horticulture declines to simply be a management game about collecting and identifying plants, which adds to its allure and makes it a compelling experience.

Sifting through secrets

The structure of Strange Horticulture is fairly predictable. Each day, a procession of clients enter your store and you learn about their lives and what they are seeking and use that to try and provide a plant that will aid them. With a setup like this, you might expect a game where you're balancing expenses, buying upgrades, etc. to grow your business, but none of that is in this game.

Instead, you go on foraging adventures directed by cryptic clues, page through manuscripts to identify your inventory, and brew elixirs based on half-remembered recipes, among other things, all in an effort to advance and direct a story caught up in ancient rituals and otherworldly evil. This all takes place within the confines of your shop and your interactions are tied to shuffling through papers on your desk as rain patters against the window and the shop cat rests on your counter.

Patient puzzling

Though it's not entirely clear when the game starts, all of your interactions in Strange Horticulture are connected and lead to a larger overall story. To advance some parts of this story in specific ways, you may need to have successfully used clues to gather the right plants when the time comes or have opted to give people plants they may not have actually been asking for. At times, the excercise of solving these clues can be tedious and involve some amount of trial and error, but thankfully none of it is so obtuse that you won't be able to recognize that something needs to be done.

It's also an incredibly smart move by the developers of the game to make its clue-solving and foraging gameplay untethered from the days that the game is broken up into. On any given day in the shop, you can opt to explore the map to look for plants as many times as you want, with the only barrier being a sort of travel meter that takes time to refill and can be replenished more quickly by serving customers or watering your plants.

Digging up dirt

Strange Horticulture has multiple endings and–upon reaching one of them–has some more game to offer around identifying plants that went unidentified in your playthrough. It's a nice addition, especially since additional new playthroughs will likely remove a lot of mystery around the plants and clue-solving, but removed from the context of the larger story it isn't nearly as satisfying.

The only real sore spot of Strange Horticulture is some of its user interface. I appreciate the game's commitment to having players organize actual pieces of paper, but in doing so you can come across readability issues that work much better in theory than in practice. For instance, there's a zoom feature that is very flexible and lets you read even the smallest text rather easily, but it doesn't always play that nice when certain objects are stacked on top of each other or if it doesn't get fully zoomed out.

The bottom line

There are a lot of novel and extremely clever ideas in Strange Horticulture, but by the time I finished with the game I was truly tired of its gameplay. I'm sure the issues with the game's UI had a lot to do with this, but even when things are working as they should, there's just a lot of procedural referencing and looking up that can get sloggy after a while. I'm sure another game like this could come around and find some success, but I don't think I'd be ready to play a game like Strange Horticulture again for a good long time.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/review-270089/

They say war never changes, but that hasn't stopped Risky Lab from reworking their nifty little tactics game into an updated “plus” version. For better or for worse, the changes that are present in Warbits Plus are slight and mostly feel like a way to update the look and feel of an aged mobile game that can still offer some fun, tactical action.

Modern warfare

It is clearly intentional that Warbits Plus is named the way that it is. This is no sequel. At it's core it is essentially the same game as the 2016 original. This is not to say there is no new content or updated features, however.

Warbits Plus has been fully rebuilt from the ground up, which allows for the game to display in full screen on newer devices, switch seamlessly between portrait and landscape views, undo boneheaded moves with an undo button, and play cross-platform multiplayer against people on PC or Android. In addition to this, it seems that some levels have also been reworked even though that isn't specifically noted in any of the press materials.

Almost advance

The lineage Warbits Plus is playing off of is still clear as day in this release. Military skirmishes here echo those of Advance Wars, including the same kinds of mechanics for capturing buildings, using special powers, terrain advantages, and more. To be clear: there's nothing inherently wrong with this, especially since Risky Lab comes at this with a level of care that demonstrates their respect for those games while giving a unique identity to their own creation.

That said, this approach feels a little less novel than it did when Warbits first released eight years ago, and it still suffers from a lot of the same issues I bump into when playing games like this. Everything is all fun and dandy until there's some level in the campaign that challenges you to be a tactical wizard or otherwise grind out a war of attrition, and–whether I happen to figure out the swift way to win or not–neither approach ends up feeling all that rewarding.

Kinks in the war machine

Up until I got to some of the late stages inWarbits Plus that put me off a bit, I also seemed to encounter some strange game behavior that I can't tell was purposeful or just a bug. For example, the touted “undo” button in this upgraded version of the game doesn't always seem to appear. I also found that I was unable to use any command powers if there was a unit (even if it was friendly) on my headquarters.

These might sound like small issues, but there were multiple times where I'd run into them and they would effectively kill any chance I had at winning. Maybe these are just design choices, but if they are they feel bad because they are unintuitive, underexplained, and inconsistent. So, as much of this ill will could be coming from my own negative experiences where I'd do something wrong and mess up a mission, it almost always ended up feeling worse because tools that are seemingly available to help bail players out or correct issues seem to just vanish under certain circumstances.

The bottom line

Warbits Plus is a charming little tactics game, and it's worth celebrating as a quality revamp of a beloved mobile title. I don't love the way its difficulty spikes or how some of its systems don't behave how I expect them to, but I can imagine tactics nuts or anyone pining for another Advance Wars seeing a lot to like here. Heck, even I like a lot of it. That just ends at a certain point, though, and it was before I had completed the game.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/review-270100/